The head of a small far-right party in Italy spurned a Bastille Day party at the French embassy in Rome on Saturday in anger at Paris City Hall awarding medals to the German captains of a migrant rescue ship.Giorgia Meloni called the medal, and a 100,000-euros ($113,000) donation Paris made to a separate French-based migrant-rescue organization, “new, intolerable provocations by Paris.”A group of around 20 members of Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia (Italian Fraternity) party ...

Maltese authorities charged three young African migrants on Saturday with committing an act of terrorism for hijacking a vessel that rescued them off the coast of Libya.The two teenagers from Guinea and one from Ivory Coast, aged 15, 16 and 19, are accused of forcing the Palau-flagged tanker Elhiblu I towards Malta after it picked up 108 migrants, including women and children, on Wednesday and headed towards its destination in Libya.A Maltese special operations unit boarded the ship a day later, ...

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres on Monday launched a new global strategy to combat hate speech, a growing scourge he said has “poisoned” debate on crucial challenges like migration. Guterres announced the effort, which will be led by his special adviser on genocide prevention Adama Dieng, at the UN Human Rights Council. “Hate is moving into the mainstream -- in liberal democracies and authoritarian systems alike,” he said in a speech at the opening of the ...

The U.N. refugee agency says people smugglers are taking greater risks to ferry their human cargo toward Europe as Libya's coast guard intercepts more and more boats carrying migrants, increasing the likelihood that those on board may die during the Mediterranean journeys. That's one of the key findings from the latest UNHCR report about efforts to reach Europe. The report, released early Monday and titled "Desperate Journeys," says that even though the number of crossings and deaths ...

Thousands take the serious risk of sailing into the Mediterranean, although they know that it may be difficult to survive the journey. They take advantage of the instability in Libya, making it their starting point towards European luxury. What is strange or probably confusing is that if you ask these people about the atheistic West, they will insult, degrade and condemn it. The question is thus why do they wish to go there and risk their lives to get there? Frankly, I cannot understand this ...

Under a blazing sun, Youssouf picks food from a Moroccan rubbish dump, one of many young people who scavages to survive while dreaming of life in nearby Spain. "My mother would be sick if she saw this," said Youssouf, a 20-year-old from Guinea. "We are going through a very difficult period. There's no work, we eat from bins, we don't have a choice." The foul-smelling rubbish dump is on the hills above Fnideq, a seaside city not far from where Morocco's King Mohammed VI spends ...

Italy and Libya on Saturday agreed to reactivate a friendship treaty signed a decade ago that allows migrants to be returned to Libyan territory.“We agreed to reactivate the 2008 Italian-Libyan friendship treaty,” said Libya’s foreign minister Mohamad Siala in a joint press conference in Tripoli with Italian counterpart Enzo Moavero Milanesi.Milanesi hailed the agreement reached during his first visit to Tripoli as “significant and promising”.The original treaty was ...

Sixty-three migrants are missing after the inflatable boat they were on sunk off the coast of Libya, a spokesman for the country's navy told AFP, citing eyewitness accounts from survivors. General Ayoub Kacem said that 41 migrants wearing life jackets were rescued. According to the survivors, there were 104 people on board the vessel, which sank off Garaboulli, east of Tripoli. In addition to the 41 people rescued, a Libyan coastguard boat returned to Tripoli Monday with another 235 migrants, ...

Germany’s interior minister Horst Seehofer will resign both his office and his position as head of the hardline conservative Bavarian CSU party after a weeks-long confrontation with Chancellor Angela Merkel over migration, party sources told AFP Sunday.Sunday July 1 was a self-imposed deadline for Seehofer to either accept Merkel’s agreements with other European Union countries to reduce immigration or to defy her by starting to turn away at the border asylum seekers already ...

A small number of migrants have used Russia’s World Cup ticketing system that allows visa-free travel for foreign fans to try to enter the European Union illegally, with neighboring Belarus and Finland reporting cases. Moscow has implemented a Fan ID system that exempts visiting fans from Russia’s strict visa system and allows them to move freely between host cities for the tournament between June 15 and July 15. Belarus, which signed an agreement with Russia allowing Fan ID holders ...